Watching Jonathan Burrows's Stop Quartet, you can spend a lot of time figuring out whether its dancers are following a set of rules, and if so, what they might be. So much of this 45-minute work feels like a board game. The dancers perform on a stage that is chequered with light, and their flurried bursts of activity are punctuated by sudden pauses, as if a die has been thrown and they await its instruction. Sometimes the dancers' pathways are geometrically staggered; sometimes they look random. Often they grin, as if they have arrived at some brilliant strategy or infuriating impasse that only they understand.
It depends on your taste and your mood how long this quasi game-playing holds your attention. The choreography is deliberately restricted, a language of stiff-legged walks, pattering runs, spiralling arm movements and vestigial human gesture. On the other hand, the dancers are very interesting to observe, especially the two men who dominate the first half - Burrows busy and bossy and Henri Montes his sweet-faced, abstracted opposite. The detail of their movements can be equally fascinating, as one dancer's phrasing sparks contrasts and correspondences with another, and rhythmic patterns emerge that seem both spontaneous and exquisitely rigorous.
Personally, I loved Stop Quartet for about 30 minutes, but I was defeated by its inwardness. Made in 1996, it prefigures Burrows's more recent, minimal experiments. Yet while works like Both Sitting Duet may be even more reduced in their dance material, their humour and their operations are less opaque. Mind games can be a spectator sport, but not completely so in this brilliant but rarefied quartet.
